It's pretty easy to offer consumers a great deal when you're willing to dump wheelbarrows of cash into a furnace to do so.

Inflation isn't a deterrent to savings, it just means you have to put your savings somewhere that it also does work, i.e. invested in something. Having a non-zero inflation rate encourages investment, which encourages economic growth. This is good. But it's not the main reason we need constant inflation.

The reason we need constant inflation is because deflation is extremely harmful; it causes debts to grow which can make people and businesses insolvent. The Fed has a 2% inflation target because low inflation rates are manageable and because 2% is high enough that a decrease still won't go negative.

In general, documents are considered hearsay and are inadmissible. There are exceptions to the hearsay rule that allow them to be introduced, for example public records that are made in the normal course of business, but police reports are explicitly and specifically excluded from those exceptions. It might be possible to introduce a police report as evidence if the officer who wrote it is present to testify to its authenticity and accuracy, and to be cross-examined about its contents, but if the officer is there it's easier to avoid the hearsay question entirely by just having the officer testify.

Note that this applies not just to written police reports but also to bodycam footage. You still need someone to testify that the footage is authentic and accurate, and available to be cross-examined about it. With bodycam footage I suppose that could be either the officer or a technician responsible for collecting and archiving the footage.

In the case of an AI-generated summary of the footage, if the officer checked and edited the output I think it would be exactly the same as the officer's self-written report. If the officer didn't check and edit the output, then it would be a mechanical transformation of the bodycam footage and you'd need someone to testify to the accuracy of that transformation, as well as the authenticity of the footage. I don't think anyone could honestly testify that the transformation is guaranteed to be correct and accurate. In any case, though, the defense could always just review the footage to point out any inaccuracies in the summary. Most likely the summary would be ignored completely and the bodycam footage would be used directly, after appropriate testimony about its authenticity.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

How dare the EU have consumer protection laws that inconvenience a corporation? That's un-American!

Women being treated like property who should submit to a good fucking on demand is not an acceptable solution to your difficulty finding a partner for sex.

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

The problem being that you can't actually extract information that wasn't there, you can only add new information that fits.

If you treat the extra detail as an inaccurate estimate, it's fine. But zoom in on that letter someone's holding in their hands and whatever you read will have been made up by the AI.

>Once the AI has written a report of what it thinks it saw on the bodycam, the actual bodycam recording will be deleted in order to "save space".

Baseless fearmongering. If they ever tried that, the defence would have an easy time getting the reports based on the original missing evidence thrown out.

Bodycam recordings will be deleted in accordance with an official retention schedule, but anything determined likely to be needed as evidence for court will be preserved beyond that standard limit.

What I would be more concerned with is not that such recordings will be deleted to cover up exculpatory evidence, but that they'll be deleted to cover a guilty cop's ass. And that's a lot easier because they simply have to claim nothing happened at all.

Luckily, we already spend a LOT of money on police equipment and storage is rapidly getting arbitrarily affordable. There's really no justification for not setting retention standards that are more than long enough to prevent such scenarios from routinely occurring without being extremely suspicious events.

That's actually reasonable. Maybe the law you violate isn't, but the secondary law saying "using this to aid in violating a law" is.

Using a VPN while accessing prohibited material is like wearing a disguise while robbing a bank. It shows you know you were committing a crime and put in extra effort to avoid being caught. It's something that undermines any claims of "I didn't know I was doing anything wrong".

Whether that material should be prohibited in the first place is a different matter.

Hey, now. We're far more civilized and make spying on our own citizens illegal. ...That's why we have agreements with our allies to spy on each other's citizens and share the information to ensure we don't break this very important law.

No, they do not stand there with pen and paper scribbling as they talk to people. Short notes on items of interest is about it.

If they need to know every word you said, you get brought in for an interview and it's on camera. Though maybe with the bodycams we're going to see less of that and more of what was said at the scene. I wouldn't know, the last time I did any tech work for cops they were only starting to talk about maybe not resisting bodycams.

The AI summary will be more like an index to the actual recorded evidence, and whether you trust that or not is based on whether you trust the verification tech the camera manufacturers employed and the chain of custody from camera to courtroom.

If you're ever in court on a jury and have to judge whether an officer's written notes are trustworthy... well, they are a trustworthy record of what the officer wanted to have recorded. I'm not saying I ever saw deliberately faked notes or ever saw an officer with a second notebook (pages are numbered so you can't just tear one out)... but I've seen officers wait until they get back to the station to make their notes rather than immediately on the scene, which means they're relying on their memory and human memory is not great. The longer you wait, the more likely your imagination is filling in gaps where you don't actually have clear recall.

For fingerprints? Ugh. I tend to believe they're reliable if you get a good print for establishing probabilities. I also tend to think the experts overstate the probabilities. And good prints are fairly rare. Again, I don't know from direct experience but my time with forensics cops taught me they're far, far more rare than you might expect if you just watched an episode of Law & Order.